The Secret Christmas Pressies

Never teach your family to read your blog or you’ll have to keep things secret forever… just sayin’ ;o) Anyway, now that the big day has passed I can share the following with you.

1. A cover for my mum’s iPad. To be fair that wasn’t strictly a Christmas pressie, she’d just asked if I could make her one, and I got it done in time for while they were up visiting. I used some of my charms from the text swap, and some texty FQs from my stash, plus, of course, an MM typewriter, and used QAYG for the texty bit before appliqueing the typewriter in place. This was the item I learned my lesson on, however I’d happened to make it a bit big on purpose, so it still fit after the incredible shrinking batting did its thing. I had designed it so that the batting would be excluded from the seam allowance, so that reduced the bulk at the edges, making it fit nicely – phew!

2. The quilt for mum and dad made from traditional Provencal fabrics, bought in the market at Carpentras (no really, they sell good fabric in the markets, honestly!) and cream Klona, backed in a cream Egyptian cotton sheet from, err, Tesco. Oh boy did this quilt give me grief!

The pattern is mine, so the first grief was totally of my own doing… I designed it before I started quilting, a good 2 months before I’d even tried it, and I got the seam allowance calculations wrong, adding just one 1/4″ SA rather than 2 for each strip of fabric that I’d enthusiastically chopped down as soon as I got home. This gave me weird sized blocks in the end – 11 1/4″ anyone?! But I managed it finally, mostly through a couple of weekend Bond marathons on Sky.

See that cream fabric? Well I’d ordered natural Klona from Remnant House thinking it would be perfect, but what do you know, the natual isn’t actually the same as all the other Klona, but is in fact like rough cotton – argh! So I had to then get some in cream.

See how it looks quite big (that’s my dad’s toes at the bottom there just peeking out), well at 76″ square, it turned out to be too big for my kitchen floor basting area, and my gran’s kitchen floor, and the library floor, and then I ran out of options so tried it on gran’s living room carpet. Uh, yeah, don’t try spray basting on carpet if you can’t hold the backing down and taught *sigh* So then I had to do it in 2 parts on my kitchen floor, which was rather nightmarish, and took me the whole day to do, including marking out the quilting lines.

Oh sweets, if only you'd mentioned it I could've told you that about the Klona..I made that mistake last year! And I know exactly what you mean a bout the basting issues – no room here either. Still, thoses aside, you made a lovely quilt! And the texty typewriter is just genius 🙂

Would love an ipad cover like that and I don't even have an ipad. I have to baste on a small area of living room carpet which is why I don't spray baste. The chances of me not getting it all over the carpet, sofa and everything else is just too unlikely for me to attempt it!

Dispite all of the problems you had making it the quilt is perfectly beautiful! I'd buy myself an iPad just to have a cover like that. Your mom must think she raised a very talented daughter. Happy weekend.